Sea otters are a keystone species, or keystone predator, that, pretty well documented how their
foraging, their feeding behaviors changes the community structure of the invertebrates
that they’re eating. In the outer coast of Washington, the sea otter populations were
hunted to extinction, or local extirpation, they call it. Around 1970,
a few dozen animals were reintroduced from Alaska here on the outer coast. That population has
grown in the last 45 years from a few dozen to somewhere upwards above 1200 individuals
now. We’re out here with the National Marine Fisheries Service. We’ve got two dive teams
in the water here, and they are off doing surveys of the macroinvertebrates and macroalgae
to monitor survey transects that were last visited in 1999. One of the goals of
the research program really is to just monitor the long-term health of the ocean here.
We consider the sea otters to be both a charismatic species but also an indicator
species of ecosystem health. These are transects that were first established when the sea otter
population was fairly small in the outer coast, and now the population has about tripled in
size since the last surveys were conducted. So we’re really interested in seeing what changes
in the community have developed from that.